It's neither recent or pristine, but having a slim 4C/64GB thing at that price is worth considering.. no more rpi clusters :p
These are really old, Socket F, DDR2 blades. Given that the corresponding blade center will be needed as well, probably not that good a deal.
- The centers are large and heavy, needs a fair amount of space, can't really be handled alone. Also means they're shipped on a pallet, which is somewhat expensive.
- Blades are less common overall compared to servers
- Blades have more peculiar I/O than normal servers, you can't just stick an IB card or GPU in there
- The backend I/O modules are fairly rare 2nd hand, so either you find a center which has the modules you want or you're SOL
I'd start with a used Dell Precision T7xxx series off of Ebay for a <$300 including RAM and a Xeon or two
Thanks for the tip though, could be of use for a friend.